A few years ago I made the rather bold proclamation that 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection was the worst sequel to a long running horror franchise that I’d ever seen and while there was many reasons behind why I made this selection, who would have thought that one of them was because I hadn’t yet watched Puppet Master: The Legacy? I’m not sure exactly what the idea was behind one of the most woeful and desperate follow ups I’ve ever seen, but whatever the hell inspired Charles Band to cobble together this soulless cash-in (I’m guessing money), it’s one of the most brazenly cheap attempts at filmmaking I’ve ever seen.
You see, in an attempt to panel beat Puppet Master’s notoriously nonexistent continuity into some sort of coherent timeline, The Legacy is mostly made up of reused clips of all the previous movies with only a flabbergasting ten minutes or so of actual new footage to be seen. Does this fan edit mascarading as a movie actually manage to wrestle the continuity in line? I have a more pertinent question to hand: WHAT THE FUCK, CHARLES BAND?
Rogue agent Maclain has broken into the Bodega Bay Inn in order to discover the elusive secrets to giving life that original Puppet Master Andre Toulon had sole dominion over, but after his diary spontaneously bursts into flames when she tries to read it, she’s forced to take more direct methods. In the basement, she finds Eric Weiss, an elderly man who currently holds the title of Puppet Master and is babysitting Toulon’s cadre of misshapen dolls and after pulling a gun on him, she grills him on the secrets of eternal life at gun point.
Thus begins a reshuffling of the most important Puppet Master occurrences as Eric attempts to explain decades of disjointed history to the determined agent while the puppets dispassionately look on presumably because they’ve heard this crap before. Before our eyes, we shamelessly retread the days of Retro Puppet Master that told of Toulin’s younger years in France and quickly cover the war years seen in Puppet Master III as the puppeteer and his creations square up to the Nazis. It’s here we discover that Weiss is actually Peter Hertz, the young boy Toulon befriended at the time and it’s how he now is in possession of Blade, Jester, Pinhead and the rest of the gang. As we continue on through the series in a rejigged chronological order, Maclain brings up an important point: if the puppets are so benevolent, why have they slaughtered so many innocent people (not the Nazis, of course)?
It seems that there’s a secret behind the puppets that no one has yet discovered – but don’t expect to find out what it is here, because it looks like they spent a buck o’ five on the sparce new footage and any true revelations will be way too expensive.
To be honest, I’m not actually confident that Puppet Master: The Legacy can claim to be an actual movie when the falling back on old footage ranks right up there with a clip episode of an old sitcom that’s fast run out of ideas. Undoubtedly the nadir of a franchise that doesn’t actually have that many high points to start with, it seems to have been made purely because someone dared Charles Band to make sense of the franchise’s gnarled cannon and the Full Moon producer had a spare weekend to kill and an editing machine handy. Thus we get Puppet Master: The Legacy, which sees two jobbing actors furiously retcon an entire franchise as if their mortgages depend upon it while we get an hour of repurposed footage that plainly suggests otherwise. But what’s most amusing is that a final, thank you note tacked to the end of the film seems to think that this film is supposed to be some sort of gift to the fans when surely whipping up a timeline that made sense in the first place probably would have been more welcome.
So what changes does the film make? Well, helpfully, it does actually put the movies in some sort of order that makes some sort of sense and finally figures out where Puppet Master II should finally sit in the scheme of things considering that it kills off Leech Woman and Tunneler and introduces a villainous, zombiefied Toulon. It also figures out that the oddball Curse Of Puppet Master should slot into the wilderness years of the franchise as some sort of weird side-mission and that the Nazi-killing part III should take point of the series rather than the first film (which, interestingly, is hardly used). However, while the screenplay (all ten minutes of it) works hard to sand down those edges in order to make those joins finally fit, true Puppetheads will know that it’s a lost cause, and no amount of recycling will change that.
Additionally, while the creators obviously assumed that this would be some sort of cost effective victory lap, it also reminds us how shitty some of these movies actually were. Be it Greg Sestero’s impressively dead performance in Retro Puppet Master, to the ‘Allo ‘Allo level of German accents used in Puppet Master III (just yelling “Schnell!” a lot doesn’t automatically make you sound German, Richard Lynch), one thing this clip show does do is remind you just how wacked out this franchise really is. In fact, if Puppet Master: The Legacy does anything, it leads me to want to try and reassess the third film more, especially as the franchise would eventually go on to fully embrace the whole Puppet vs Nazis thing in the future.
However, while the movie reminds you what you may have liked about the past movies while simultaneously reminding you that bits really sucked, it’s still money for old rope and when it comes to new material, it’s severely lacking. What we get is a “rogue agent” who has obviously spent more time on her eye makeup than she has formulating an actual plan and a grizzled old dude who seems to have no idea about the legacy he’s become a part of. However, I have to say that it takes a special kind of “talent” to provide 10 minutes of explanation that somehow delivers more questions than answers and leaves us with a cliffhanger ending that would be amusing if it wasn’t so crap. Even the dolls themselves seemed resigned that their glory days are behind them as they spend the majority of their screentime just staring into the void and while the events of Puppet Master may have given them life, Legacy curses them with abject boredom.
Arguably the lowest ebb any franchise entry has ever reached (and bear in mind that I’ve seen the Jeepers Creepers reboot), Puppet Master: The Legacy is a risible addition to the franchise cannon that surely indicates that it’s on its last legs. However, considering that I’m actually only halfway through the franchise as a whole, there’s a whole lot more legacy to come. Let’s hope there’s at least some new footage to go along with it.
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